AIPAC Bribery and the Best Democracy Money Can Buy

Richard Mellor

Afscme Local 444, retired

HEO/GED

8-31-24

Look at the cost of the 2022 primaries that he cites in this video; $8billion. How can that be a democracy of the people? It is, but only certain people. Athenian democracy, that historians champion so much, was a democracy for slave owners,; it was a slaveocracy. Slaves didn't get to vote. The US is a bourgeois democracy, the working class gets to vote, but only for candidates from one of the two bourgeois (capitalist) parties.

Beyond that, you have to have the money. This is why the trade union bureaucracy, that is a political arm of the Democratic Party in the workers' organizations, wasting hundreds of millions of dollars, billions over decades (workers hard earned dues money) getting Democrats in to office is criminal; we can’t beat capitalists with money, they have more of it; that’s why we call them capitalists. The money and resources that the labor hierarchy controls---structure, an army of full timers---- could be used to build a workers political alternative that could challenge the bourgeois parties in Congress but also in society by at very least questioning the validity and ideology of the so-called free market and capitalism.

 

The main reason the trade union hierarchy refuses to do this is because the mood in society cries out for change. The two parties of big business are pretty much despised as workers living standards decline no matter which party is in power. The environmental crisis alone is threatening our very existence. Palestine Ohio comes to mind or the huge explosion in West, Texas (who would allow a fertiliser plant next to a school?) or the near collapse of the Oroville Dam in California that forced the evacuation of some 200,000 people, or the horrific deep water drilling spill in the Gulf of Mexico. These aren’t accidents, they are market driven. In the case of the latter, the writing of the rules for deepwater drilling was handed over from government regulators to the energy industry personnel who wrote them in pencil according to the New York Times. There are too many examples to cite here and notice that they disappear from the media once the smoke clears. They want us to forget these events, not think about them why they happen or what the long term consequences are.

 

The trade union hierarchy has no solution to this other than to elect a Democrat in to office and plead with Wall Street and its political representatives to be less aggressive, to not be greedy, be nice. They’re not in the driver’s seat and can always blame the Democrats or politics in general, eg all politicians are bad.

 

To build an alternative, or take the lead in building one would mean they would have to produce the goods and respond to the increasing desire for change that exists in US society but they can’t. To use a phrase the great English historian Christopher Hill used when referring to the heroic figures that led the reform movement against the feudal aristocracy in the English Revolution, the labor leaders to a “t” cannot overcome “the stop in the mind”. They believe that capitalism in the only form of social organization and capitalists (Onan Musk, Bill Gates, Buffett etc.) are the rightful lords of the universe. The system has to be upheld. We know where that leads.

 

Their refusal to offer an alternative is a major reason for the rise of the right and the emergence and appeal of Trump.

 

On Tik Tok @richardmellor860

X Formerly Twitter @kurnutovsky